re: concrete thinking process....
I was discussing legal and constitutional precedents. The leftist story is that the only reason Bush was reluctant to let Rice testify under oath was because he was a four-star son of a bitch. Period. This is not true.
There are many precedents for such refusals, and I simply selected Clarke's example to drive the point home.
I'm sorry that engineers don't come up to your stellar levels of perception. What do you do for a living?